Sue Townsend - The Woman Who Went To Bed For A Year

Rating: 3/5

Review:
Not one of Sue Townsend's best

I like Sue Townsend's work very much but I'm afraid I didn't get on all that well with this book. It is well written, easy to read and amusing in places but I thought that it lacked some of Townsend's real wit and sharp insight.

The story is of Eva, a woman whose twin children go away to university and whose tedious, sexist, emotionally illiterate (and many other objectionable things) husband turns out to have been having an affair for years. Eva goes to bed for a year to...well...no-one is sure. Even she doesn't know. It's a sort of withdrawal from all the things she hates about the world and a `finding herself' experience. Townsend then uses this to satirise and rant against what she dislikes about the world. There's a monstrous, self-obsessed, manipulative teenager, sexism and racism, some well-directed barbs like "[my children] live in a very small world called the internet where cynicism is the norm and cruelty has taken the place of humour," and so on. There's even a sort of Life Of Brian episode.

It's all quite amusing and the style carries you along nicely, but it didn't seem to me to have much cohesion nor much of the bite, insight and shrewd observation which have made many of Sue Townsend's books so good. It just rather peters out and although I think Eva's eventual realisation is of a profound and important truth I couldn't really see how the realisation stemmed from what had happened. (I also think that Henry James's list of the three important things in human life says it more powerfully and in a single sentence than this book does.)

This book is an easy, occasionally amusing read. I didn't actively dislike it but I'm afraid I didn't think it added up to much.